Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Net Sports: The Logic of Volleyball & Tennis

The NCAA Volleyball championships ended this week with a
dominant performance by the University of Texas team. Their women played a
superb power game while displaying uncanny and tenacious digging defense as
they cruised past Oregon. The tournament games represented the epitome of the logic of net games where a net separates
the two teams or opponents as in tennis.

The separation created by the net creates a dynamic different than contact team sports because it prohibits opponents from
physically impacting a player to throw that player off his or her execution. This insulation
from physical impact whether a tackle, block, bump, grab or check that
dominates football, soccer or modern basketball means that that no one can lay
a body on you and knock you our of your rhythm or skill by sheer physical
impact or violence. This displaces the role of intimidation and forces players
and teams to rely more on intellectual strategic and tactical misdirection to
throw players out of their games.

The separation from physical buffeting permits a premium
focus upon skill and form without the need for massive muscular or mental ferocity
to fight through the physical assault upon body and form in contact sports. This
freedom from physical intimidation permits focus proficiency and minute
gradations that are often impossible to sustain in execution in “contact”
sports.

I cannot emphasize enough how net sports channel strength
and skill development into pure form and coordination rather than the type of
strength, aggression and ferocity needed to fight through contact sport. This
is not football with its violent and planned collisions and it is
not basketball or soccer with its “incidental” but endless contact (I won’t
even talk about hockey with its legalized brawling). The open space of net
sports permits players to execute in space and time free of the manhandling of
contact. It also, like baseball, isolates a very fine-grained form of evident
responsibility for one’s actions in coordination with others.

It also leads to a different mental mind-set. The physical
structure of the court amplifies this. Unlike flow sports that move from one
basket/goal/end zone to another and can expand the field of play, the field of
play remains rigidly circumscribed. Players have nowhere to go with no movement
away from their spot to the other end of the court of field. Each player has
responsibility for the space they control and intricate moving relations,
almost balletic, with each other once action starts. This circumscribed court emphasizes and rewards quickness and lightening pattern recognition and reaction time over pure speed that open fields or sprints to the other end of a two ended field requires.

Players possess autonomy in their space. They are responsible
for their side of the court as in tennis or their part of the court in
volleyball. It requires players to play both offense and defense but in the
same space with the same patterns rather than moving suddenly to the other end
of the field to reposition. Although like football and other reset sports, it
permits the player or team to reset after each point and prepare for the play
rather than the pure flow sports such as soccer or lacrosse or water polo. This
permits players and coaches to develop superb and unfettered skill sets because
no one is physically disrupting their actions. It means plays and schemes exist
with a relative clarity of purpose and execution. This enables a form of beauty
that can exist almost unsullied such as the perfection of a serve or beauty of
a return at full extension or a magnificent dig that requires immense physical
courage and skill and body control all at the same time. The athlete’s body
exists alone in space and time unimpeded by contact with other opponents.Net sports isolate responsibility in a
visible and inescapable manner since no one is disrupting them.

This capacity to execute plays without opponents contact
puts a premium upon speed and precision and almost unconscious situational
awareness of where teammates are. At the same time the attack/defense dynamic
moves from one of pure strength and bullying through or towards the goal and relies
upon reaction and throwing off the anticipated system and flow of the other
team. Because the opponents cannot use physical strength or bullying, teams and
players have to rely upon skill, tactical placement, disturbing rhythms and
immense speed and precision in their response.

The placement of the ball dominates the movement and
tactics. The serve, the return or in volleyball the serve reception that then
gets the ball to the setter determine almost everything. The teams must move
incredibly fast given the speed or placement of serves and adapt quickly and in
a meticulous choreographed manner.

Offense and defense depend upon the mind and patterns
recognition and incredible speed of reaction. This is true of all elite one on
one competition, but the net court remains fixed and static. All this occurs in
a defined area that cannot be expanded through movement up and down the court.
This closure of the court intensifies the speed of reaction time and minimizes
the time to see the pattern and react.

Sometimes players are strong enough to simply overpower the
other side with blistering serves or power hits that move so fast they go over
or through blocks. But more often, players must place the serve at a precise
spot with differential speed or spin. The serve seeks to throw the receiver off
their best return. In tennis a fine serve forces the returner to a weakened or
misplaced return that in many ways determines the point that may not end until
five hits later. Likewise in volleyball serve receive remains stunningly
important. If the receiver cannot get it to the setter in the right place, the
set will be off either in terms of space or position on the court. This throws
off the entire scheme; again the point may be over even though it takes five or
six hits to get there.

Placement, speed, deception, misdirection all matter in
direct competition team sports but they reach their purest form in net sports
because the opponent does not have the option of pushing or blocking or
checking someone out of the way. Opponents must draw each other out of position
with tactical insight and physical or psychological misdirection. The mind and
skill must win, not just physical disruption.

Because of this structure the serve dominates net sports in
unique ways almost equivalent to the importance of the pitch in baseball. The
baroque techniques and rococo gyrations of table tennis serves highlight this
domination and importance to incongruous extremes.

Because of the structure as both a net sport and a reset
sport, the serve and serve reception overwhelm all other aspects of the sport. Serves
are the one moment when the player is alone, unfettered and has complete
control of their actions, much like the pitcher in baseball.

The primacy of the serve places immense emphasis upon
developing complex, powerful and intriguing serves. Sheer speed is not enough. Elite
defenders quickly master the speed serve. Players need accuracy and diversity.
If a defender only has to master one serve reception, they can anticipate and
pounce. Volleyball manifests this in unique ways because six separate players
will serve, and each player can bring a unique skill, rhythm, and speed to the
game. Raw power serves may be the most fun but can be the most predictable. On
the other hand floaters that land in defender’s chest or exactly between two
zones or a drop serve the slices into the back of a players hit can force
maximum extension and deflate the serve return. This displaces the offense set
up and can be far more devastating than a big booming serve. Of course the most
fun lies in the ACE where a serve blows past or forces an error by the receiver
and the player or team win the point without any return. Aces can be tactically
demoralizing, bring in the spectators and win points without exertion of the rest
of the team. They can tempt some players or teams to over rely upon them, but
when they occur, can be beautiful.

No one interferes with the serve—it remains just you and the
ball—that’s it. Along with pitching, serving represents one of the purest
moments in all sports. It isolates the athlete, the athlete’s skill and the
requirements of a situation. For instance the type of serve will change
depending upon the serve reception skill of the opponent; it will change
depending upon the rhythm or expectation built up at that point in the game; it
will change depending upon one’s own capacity to hit aces; it changes depending
upon how important the point is and how much pressure is upon both server and
receiver; it changes depending upon the noise or excitement or stress emanating
from the spectators and fans. Elite serving requires immense situational
awareness, exceptional self-control and superb skill. Modern rally scoring
amplifies this because missing a serve gives a point to the other side as well
as returning the serve to the other side in volleyball, while in tennis it
gives away a point when all the advantages are on one’s own side.

The situational pressures exist in the mind. In net sports,
the mind and discipline remain supreme, I don’t care how supremely skilled or
focused an athletes is the unexpected surprise and intimidation of physical
contact, legal or illegal, designed to destroy a person’s concentration or
skillful execution changes everything. It emphasizes another kind of
bigger/faster/stronger to fight off physical battering.

The structure of each cluster of sports generates their own
logic of completion and excellence. Parallel
competitive sports like swimming or a reset sport like football or
volleyball/tennis have their own dynamics and logics. And these shape the type
of training and person and dynamic and action. The net sports present their own
logics of execution, precision and, above all, intense initiating and reactive
intelligence.

1 comment:

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About Me

I teach at the University of Washington where I served as the faculty athletic representative. I created Point of the Game as a chance to reflect upon upon the role of sport in our society. Point of the Game seeks to be a conversation about about the nature of ethics in athletics and its relation to our human condition.